We don't make good wives (fiction)

He
had a general idea of that old Celtic magic - how you capture a
selkie. But he forgot that seals are mammals - basically warm blooded,
similar enough to a human being that there is some compatibility.
Stealing my serpent skin when I was in mermaid form was just really not a
smart idea.

So how desperate does a man
have to be to try and capture not a mermaid, but a merpent as a
wife? Really. What you do for dangerous sex. You'd think they'd have more sense. and I realize that
with these pinkish-white explorers just coming in from the east that
they will mostly be men, but couldn't you at least kidnap one of the
local human women? They are round and "willing". Plump. Warm. Unpleasant. And the smell.

It's about
magic, and it's idiocy. Why men want to constantly steal women's magic,
or my own sea magic, is beyond me. It is not useful to human men, at
any rate. Even their women, they bleed, they bear children, some of the
time they don't die. The men don't seem to get this. And then they come
in, and think they can control women's magic, or my own wild magic. Not
wise.

The trouble really began when
the girls were born. Six of them, all alike. He was, not to put it
too gently, horrified. SIX?

I wanted to say, "I'm a lizard, you idiot,
what did you expect?"

They are all more or less similar, but each got
some pretty odd twists on the combination of sea magic and human
traits. All can look human, but none has the heart of a monkey. They
will be trouble throughout the great lakes before long, and more power to
them. I mean to send them off to their Aunt Nessie for training.

And
the looks. White hair, greenish hair, a strange, slightly green cast
to the skin. I think they are gorgeous, but perhaps I'm biased. In
this area, where brown skin, eyes and black hair are the norm, and the
incomers are orangeheads with blue eyes, these girls look - unearthly.
Terrifying and electric.

And with six of them, how long do you
think it took for us to find where he'd hidden my skin? Please. I
hadn't been in the lake for more than two years, and he literally could
not imagine how terrible the longing for my three dimensional home
was. Why any creature would choose to live in that hot, dry, air space
is unknown to me.